Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

Yael Bartana
Jews! Fellow countrymen! People! Peeeeeople!
You think the old woman who still sleeps under Rifke’s quilt doesn’t want to see you?
Has forgotten about you? You’re wrong. She dreams about you every night. Dreams and
trembles with fear. Since the night you were gone and her mother reached for your quilt,
she has had nightmares. Bad dreams. Only you can chase them away. Let the three million
Jews that Poland has missed stand by her bed and finally chase away the demons.
Return to Poland, to your country! Stand by her bed and lay your hands on that old quilt.
Thin as a sheet, with the down long gone. I’m telling you, lay your hands on her, and tell
her, ‘We’re giving this quilt to you’.
‘What do we need it for? There’s no longer any down in it, only pain. Heal our wounds,
and you’ll heal yours’. And we’ll be together again.
This is a call, not to the dead but to the living. We want three million Jews to return to
Poland, to live with us again. We need you! We are asking you to return!
When you left, we were secretly happy. We kept saying, ‘At last we’re home by ourselves’.
The Polish Pole in Poland, with no one disturbing us. And because we still weren’t happy,
from time to time we found a Jew and told him to leave Poland. Even when it was clear
that none of you were left, there were still those who kept telling you to go. And what?
Today we are fed up looking at our similar faces. On the streets of our great cities, we are
on the lookout for strangers and listening intently when they speak. Yes! Today we know
that we cannot live alone. We need the other, and there’s no closer other for us than you!
Come! The same but changed. Let us live together. Let us be different, but let one not
harm the other. We will be us at last, and you will be you. We will become you, and you
will become us. We will be local and open to the world. Together we shall create works of
hands and minds the world has never seen. And
Europe will be stunned. Everyone will learn from us how to be themselves and how to be
everyone else.
Take with you what you have and what you miss. We miss you! Let us learn our songs
again and let us write new ones. Let us learn our prayers and let us learn to live without
prayer. Return, and both you and us will finally cease to be the chosen people. Chosen for
suffering, chosen for taking wounds, and chosen for inflicting wounds. Return, and we
shall finally become Europeans.
With one language, we cannot speak.
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN